Nostr notes by Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog (Unofficial)

Having a go at Crops·To·Go The International Potato Centre ...

2026-10-30T14:17:50Z

Having a go at Crops·To·Go

The International Potato Centre (CIP) seems to have a new, AI-powered (of course) interface for requesting material from its genebank. They call it Crops·To·Go.
You have to register even if all you want to do is browse the collection. It didn’t take me very long to do so, but still: why? Requiring users to create an account before they can explore what is available seems an unnecessary barrier.
I was also not entirely convinced that all the search filters were working as expected. In particular, as I added evaluation-data filters, the number of accessions that purported to match them remained unchanged. It wasn’t clear whether the filters had been applied, whether they had returned no additional matches, or whether the matching count was simply not updating. Some more visible feedback on the effect of applying filters would make the experience a bit more reassuring.
Overall, this looks like a promising step towards making CIP’s germplasm more accessible, but the browsing experience and the transparency of the filtering process could do with some attention.

https://agro.biodiver.se/2026/10/having-a-go-at-crops%c2%b7to%c2%b7go/

#crops #potatocentre #internationalpotato #cip

#rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

Nibbles: Standing variation, Indigenous dogs, Austrian apples, ...

2026-10-21T12:10:53Z

Nibbles: Standing variation, Indigenous dogs, Austrian apples, Jordanian olive oil, Island foods

Ancient farmers didn’t have to invent the genetic diversity that made domestication possible. They selected from variation already present in wild plants, including the ancestors of rice and maize. Domestication was as much about spotting (or happening upon) useful differences as creating new ones.
English colonists in America called Indigenous dogs “wolves,” revealing as much about colonial perceptions as about the animals themselves. This history of Indigenous dogs shows how unfamiliar animals were classified through peculiarly European ideas about wildness.
Austria is bringing forgotten apple varieties back to life. Saving old varieties is one thing: getting people to grow, sell and eat them is another, but it can be done. Or at least tried.
Jordanian olive oil has a story of its own, with traditional varieties such as Nabali and Rumi at the heart of local production. This account of Jordanian olives and export markets raises the question of how much local diversity survives when oil has to compete internationally. Compare and contrast with apples.
Small island developing states have distinctive food cultures and ingredients, but face particular challenges in building sustainable and resilient food systems. FAO’s A Taste of SIDS explores the connections between island food, biodiversity and culinary heritage. Nice to see diversity within crops considered, though a few local variety names would have been nice.

https://agro.biodiver.se/2026/10/nibbles-standing-variation-indigenous-dogs-austrian-apples-jordanian-olive-oil-island-foods/

#indigenousdogs #jordanianolive #oliveoil #island #variation #apples #domestication #nice #european #fao

#rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

Plant Cuttings regrows We used to link quite a bit to Plant ...

2026-10-20T20:01:18Z

Plant Cuttings regrows

We used to link quite a bit to Plant Cuttings, Nigel Chaffey’s monthly column in the international scientific journal Annals of Botany. It was also shared on Botany One, a weblog run by the publisher of the journal. Here’s an example of one of our shoutouts, from 16 years ago no less.
Dr Chaffey always had something interesting to say, and reading his column was always a great pleasure. So I though it was a pity when it came to an end in 2019, after about a decade.
It turns out, though, that Plant Cuttings continues. A random post on social media linking to Dr Chaffey’s latest piece, a review of what sounds like an excellent book on basketry, led me to the current incarnation. You can subscribe, which I have done, and of course explore the archive of the column at Botany One.

https://agro.biodiver.se/2026/10/plant-cuttings-regrows/

#plantcuttings #nigelchaffey #annals

#rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

A seven-course meal of neglected crops Good news for those who ...

2026-10-20T10:25:28Z

A seven-course meal of neglected crops

Good news for those who want to learn more about opportunity crops, aka neglected and underutilized species:
This seven-course series curriculum equips participants with competences required to transform Neglected and Underutilized Species (NUS) into sustainable careers, commercial enterprises, and resilient food systems. Developed by African university experts and global partners, and hosted asynchronously on the RUFORUM e-Learning Platform (REP), each self-paced course awards its own certificate of completion and offers flexible adoption options for higher education institutions, whether deployed as standalone credentials, embedded into degree programmes, or used as core supplementary resources.
You do have to register, but I’ve tried it and it’s fairly painless.
I can’t say I like those images much, but the contents of the courses themselves do not betray use of AI. Here are the topics that are treated by each:
Climate and biodiversity
Nutrition and health
Business development
Postharvest and processing
Production and agronomy
Foundations and systems
Policy and food systems

https://agro.biodiver.se/2026/10/seven-course-meal-of-neglected-crops/

#underutilizedspecies #crops #nus #rep #platform #african

#rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

Brainfood: WorldCuP, Crop origins, Abrahamic plants, UK landraces ...

2026-10-19T09:44:59Z

Brainfood: WorldCuP, Crop origins, Abrahamic plants, UK landraces double, Ex situ change, Santorini vineyards, Apulian olives

WorldCuP: A database of checklists documenting the World’s Cultivated Plants and their distributions. Cool new database records 1,444,325 occurrences representing 91,358 accepted cultivated plant species across 2,718 regions in 156 countries. Geographic coverage is extensive but uneven, with notable gaps in parts of Africa, southwest and central Asia, and Oceania. Most of the taxa recorded are not in existing major crop and useful-plant databases.
Integrating multiple disciplines to locate the origins of domestication of crops. Combining evidence from botany, biogeography, genetics, archaeology, linguistics, and history overturns the traditional Mesoamerican hypothesis for cacao origins, supporting domestication in western Amazonia, probably involving multiple events. Peach palm’s domestication is best placed in southwestern Amazonia. Cupuaçu remains unresolved. Now for the other 91,355 species.
Plant Species Mentioned in Abrahamic Scriptures: Implications for Biodiversity and Traditional Agriculture and Horticulture. Olive, grapevine and fig, together with cereals such as wheat and barley, occur prominently across the three scriptural traditions examined, while date palm is particularly prominent in the Qur’an. Not clear whether scriptures qualify as checklists.
Crop landrace conservation, status, challenges and motivations in Great Britain. A national inventory (checklist even) identifies 566 landrace populations maintained on farms by 197 growers, alongside 1,876 British-origin genebank accessions, representing a total of 1,201 distinct landraces. Cereal and vegetable landrace cultivation has gone up since 2004, but forage diversity is increasingly threatened. Climate change, labour shortages and lower yields are the main challenges reported by growers.
An inventory, threat and conservation assessment of UK wheat landrace diversity. The UK currently has 27 wheat landrace varieties growing on more than 700 hectares, an increase in both variety numbers and cultivated area since 2009. Interviews with 50 farmers identify insufficient market demand and limited seed availability as key constraints. So, not climate change, labour shortages and lower yields.
Strong differentiation between source and ex situ populations of rare plant species revealed by next-generation sequencing. Across four rare plant species, ex situ populations showed significant genetic differentiation from their wild sources despite only one generation in cultivation, while overall genetic diversity and inbreeding did not differ significantly. Unrepresentative seed collection, unconscious selection during propagation or genetic drift could explain the differences. Something to test on all those British landraces, labour permitting?
Rethinking the vineyard of Santorini in a changing climate and preserving an historic wine region. Recommends a staged transition from vineyard recovery to ecological regeneration, prioritising soil organic matter, drought management and indigenous grapevine diversity. Sounds like lots of labour will be needed.
Conservation dilemmas: Xylella fastidiosa and the future(s) of olive farming. In Puglia, disease management is pushing olive farming towards competing futures: intensive, mechanised production vs the preservation of ancient trees as cultural landscapes. The fate of traditional groves depends less on technical disease solutions than on whether markets, subsidies and labour arrangements make their continued care economically viable. Well that doesn’t sound promising. Maybe try prayer?

https://agro.biodiver.se/2026/10/brainfood-worldcup-crop-origins-abrahamic-plants-uk-landraces-double-ex-situ-change-santorini-vineyards-apulian-olives/

#plantspecies #worldcup #abrahamicscriptures #crop #cultivatedplants #change #situ #amazonia #traditional #uk

#rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

Weed all about it I think I vaguely knew that USDA had a hemp ...

2026-10-18T22:11:14Z

Weed all about it

I think I vaguely knew that USDA had a hemp collection, but I would definitely not have been able to say that it was located in Geneva, NY, that it may be the largest in the world, or that it only started in 2021. Fortunately, though, the researchers responsible for the collection organized a USDA Hemp Stakeholder Event at Cornell AgriTech on September 10, and the good people at the International Hemp Podcast are summarizing the proceedings in a series of four episodes. Episode 1 is out and it includes those tidbits I began with, as well as lots of other interesting information, about hemp in particular but also more generally about how the US genebank system works. Well worth a listen.
But is it the largest collection in the world? Well, the podcast says it has over 800 accessions, and GRIN does indeed return 871 (714 active, 92 available). However, Genesys, which gets its USDA data from GRIN, says 569, which is at least closer to the “N > 600 accessions” on the webpage of the USDA Hemp Germplasm Laboratory. As it’s a fairly new collection, this all probably just means that its numbers go up fairly frequently and USDA just hasn’t updated either its website or its data on Genesys lately. Anyway, that would still make it more accessions than at VIR (491), but fewer than in Ukraine (610). That Ukraine number is split over two institutes, though. So it does look like USDA has managed to put together the world’s largest hemp collection in just 5 years. Pretty impressive.

https://agro.biodiver.se/2026/10/weed-all-about-it/

#usda #hemp #hempstakeholder #internationalhemp #stakeholderevent #hempgermplasm #hemppodcast #well #grin #genesys

#rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

Give farmers room to grow Farmers conserve and improve the crop ...

2026-10-17T09:25:24Z

Give farmers room to grow

Farmers conserve and improve the crop diversity around them. They have been doing it for millennia. Their livelihoods depend on it. But how much more might they be able to do?
Consider the coconut. Farmers select palms with characteristics they value, but with ordinary open pollination they can choose the mother but not the father. A recent paper proposes relatively simple techniques that would allow farmers to control pollination and thus choose both parents and produce more predictable planting material. It won’t turn them into breeders, but it could help them produce — and maybe even sell — better planting material.
Tamarind presents a different version of the same problem. Much of the African crop still comes from scattered, semi-wild trees. Harvesters know which trees are best, but turning a particularly good tree into a reliable source of planting material is hard. Seedlings don’t necessarily reproduce the parent’s characteristics, and tamarind takes years to mature. Grafting and other forms of vegetative propagation exist, but have not been widely adopted, according to a recent review.
There’s a nice example from southern Africa that gives a glimpse of what might be. Researchers are identifying exceptionally productive wild fruit trees in the miombo woodlands and cloning them through grafting and air-layering. A tree that might otherwise take around a dozen years to fruit can produce within four or five when propagated this way.
But it doesn’t have to be a researcher doing that. A farmer or harvester who knows a particularly productive tree, or one with especially good fruit, could propagate it through cloning rather than relying on whatever seedlings happen to arise.
Coconut and tamarind aren’t the same, and neither are the technologies needed. But the principle is similar. We sometimes think of conserving and improving crop diversity as things done for farmers, whether in a genebank, a breeding programme or a research station. But they already do these things. Sometimes they just need a little room to try doing them a little bit differently.

https://agro.biodiver.se/2026/10/give-farmers-room-to-grow/

#farmers #room #tamarind

#rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

Africa gets behind genebanks The African Union Commission ...

2026-10-16T13:00:17Z

Africa gets behind genebanks

The African Union Commission organized a Seed Summit under the theme “Resilient Seed Systems for a Food Secure Africa”, hosted by the Kingdom of Eswatini from 5-7 October 2026.
The results are summarized in the Ezulwini Outcome Document, which includes the following:
Given the precarious state of many national genebanks, it’s really good to see the call to “strengthen and sustainably finance…” them “…in Member States.” Though I would have preferred to see that phrased as “…by Member States.”
The document is a ministerial outcome that I believe still has to go through AU policy organs for validation and endorsement, so nothing here is binding yet. It sets no funding figures, timelines or locations for the continental genebank, and it uses verbs like “support” and “request” rather than “establish.” Nevertheless, the recognition of the importance of genebanks is very welcome. We will keep a beady eye on how this develops.

https://agro.biodiver.se/2026/10/africa-gets-behind-genebanks/

Mapping out the problem of crop mapping Time to celebrate the ...

2026-10-16T08:28:31Z

Mapping out the problem of crop mapping

Time to celebrate the fact that I’ve spent a surprisingly large part of the life of this blog trying to answer what sounds like a simple question: Where are crops actually grown?
In Where do bananas grow anyway?, for example, I compared several supposedly authoritative maps of banana distribution and found that they disagreed in all sorts of interesting ways. That was followed by Yes, we have more banana distribution data, which summarized the discussion that followed that post and tried to tie up some loose ends. I dread to think how many of those datasets are still available.
Why bother, you may ask? Well, because knowing where a crop can be found is necessary if genebanks want to plan gap-filling collecting: map where the crop is grown, subtract what the genebanks already have, and explore the gaps. Alas, the reality was rather less tidy, hence Gap-filling may be harder than we thought. Tell me about it.
I kept returning to the problem, though. In The geography of black rice, I wrestled with the practical business of joining passport and characterization data just to get diversity onto a map. In Ground-truthing SPAM, a global crop-distribution model confidently put crops on my mother-in-law’s farm that she and her neighbours didn’t actually grow. Bambara groundnut produced another set of contradictory maps.
Years later, the tools were a bit better: I explored Afghan wheat in QGIS, and overlaid Kenyan bean accessions on a new crop atlas.
And by earlier this year Colin Khoury was able to summarize the whole historical trajectory of gap analysis in a guest post. A trick he then repeated elsewhere.
Looking back over all these endeavours, what strikes me is how often the answer seemed to be just one step away. A better crop map, better coordinates, a more complete genebank database, a cleverer GIS analysis. And each time the new thing helped, but also exposed another problem: the crop map was wrong here, the accession wasn’t georeferenced there, or the apparent gap didn’t mean what we thought it meant. I guess that’s science.
A lot has changed since I started writing about this problem, but the basic challenge remains. We want to know where diversity is, where it might be missing, and where it is worth looking for more. Getting all the relevant data into the same map is only the beginning, but it needs to be done. There’s more data now, and making maps is easier to do. But, unless you’re a GIS expert, it’s still way too hard.

https://agro.biodiver.se/2026/10/mapping-out-the-problem-of-crop-mapping/

The apples of our eye Apples have been another recurring ...

2026-10-16T07:48:19Z

The apples of our eye

Apples have been another recurring obsession on the blog, maybe because they make the conservation problem unusually tangible, and immediate. Pretty much everyone thinks they know what an apple is, but the diversity hidden behind that word is enormous, and not much visible in supermarkets. A lot of it may have disappeared, but you can pretty much guarantee a slew of heritage apple stories in the press come autumn (and so it begins), so I guess people care. Here’s a selection of posts about apples spanning 15 years. There’s a lot more out there in the archive for you to explore.
Let’s start at the beginning, or as close to it as the genetics can get us. In 2016’s The Adam and Eve of apples?, I discussed the wild apple forests of southeastern Kazakhstan, where all of the world’s apple varieties can be traced back to an ancestral population of Malus sieversii — spread, if you believe the more colourful tellings, by bears eating the sweetest fruit and pooping the seeds around the forest. As usual, though, the genetics turned out to be more interesting than the headline. The cultivated apple isn’t a simple straight line from one mother tree; it’s the product of a long history of movement, hybridization and exchange between wild and domesticated populations all along the old trade routes out of Central Asia.
But those forests are in danger. Back in 2009, in Wild fruit relatives threatened in Central Asia, I looked at how the wild relatives of apples and other crops were vanishing along with their habitat. Among them was Malus niedzwetzkyana, the remarkable red-fleshed apple of Kyrgyzstan. These aren’t just obscure wild trees: they represented genetic diversity that has already made its way into cultivated apples, and might still have something to offer breeders. That red-fleshed apple came back a year later in Not the world’s first red apple. A new red-fleshed variety was being breathlessly presented in the press as a novelty — not GM, just 15 years of patient crossing and 20,000 rejected seedlings — but nature had got there first. M. niedzwetzkyana has been doing red flesh for millennia.
The cultivated stock has its own story of loss. In 2009’s Saving an apple a day, I looked at the loss of American apple varieties, and at the people trying to rescue what remained. Thousands of named varieties had once been grown in the United States; only a fraction survived in orchards, collections and the memories of the people who knew what they tasted like. It was a nice illustration of a familiar conservation paradox: you can lose a lot of diversity without even noticing, because the supermarket keeps selling you apples.
However, that same year, a study added a wrinkle to the “thousands lost” narrative. In Lost apples found, Jeremy pushed back a little on the standard version of the story — the one where 6,800 of 7,100 named 19th-century American apple varieties are simply gone. A team from the University of Arizona and USDA had gone looking for ghosts among old apple trees on historic farmsteads in Arizona, Utah and New Mexico. Only 34 of the resulting genotypes matched a known variety. The other 110, spread across 160 trees, matched nothing on record. Some of those are probably unnamed seedlings that never had a name to lose in the first place. But some, surely, are the supposedly lost varieties everyone had given up on. Not extinct, just lurking.
Seven years on, the USDA apple folks came back with another version of the answer. In As American as apples, Gayle Volk summarized her and Adam Henk’s trawl through historic nursery catalogues, which turned up 891 named apple cultivars grown in the US before 1908. They went looking for the 150 that seemed to matter most. The payoff: 90% are still findable today, safely tucked away in genebanks, private collections or specialist nurseries. Only 51 high-priority cultivars remained unaccounted for in any collection. For now.
The lesson isn’t that genetic erosion doesn’t happen. It plainly does, and 30 fruit nurseries vanishing a year is not nothing. No, the lesson is that “extinct” is much harder to prove than “endangered,” and pomologists with their equivalent of a swab kit keep turning out to be more patient, and luckier, than we have any right to hope.
Conserving what’s left, of course, depends on people as much as on collections and gene sequencers. In 2014, I offered up Irish eyes smiling about apple conservation. The post was prompted by Michael Hennerty’s beautiful book on the Irish apple, but the real story was the people who had nurtured the 68 varieties documented in the book over the years. Conservation often depends on a motley collection of people keeping things alive long enough for some fancy institution to discover that they matter. A few years later, Jeremy went into much more detail on Irish apples on his podcast.
Institutions, though, can be just as precarious as the work of any orchard-keeper or amateur gardener. Across the Irish Sea, the story of the UK’s apple collection showed just how fragile even a major national genebank can be. The National Fruit Collection at Brogdale in Kent, with its hundreds of apple varieties, came under threat when its funding was thrown into doubt, prompting a succession of stories about sales, new management and relocations. Oh, and royalty. Anyway, the collection is fine, but the saga was a reminder that conservation is not just about keeping things alive. You have to keep them alive with enough institutional resilience that they can survive the next crisis.
Taken together, these posts highlight a sometimes overlooked aspect of safeguarding agrobiodiversity. Conservation is not just putting varieties safely into collections, nor, on the other hand, is it just protecting wild populations from destruction. Apples show that the two are connected — or should be. These are, in the jargon, complementary conservation strategies. The diversity in a genebank has a history outside it, and the diversity out in the wild and in farms may only have a future in a genebank. We really do need both, it’s not just mom and apple pie rhetoric.

https://agro.biodiver.se/2026/10/the-apples-of-my-eye/

Not too early for an early warning system for PGRFA It turns out ...

2026-10-16T06:36:16Z

Not too early for an early warning system for PGRFA

It turns out that if you keep a blog going long enough, you start to notice that you’re not so much writing new posts as filing updates to old ones. Looking back over two decades of the blog, a few obsessions definitely surface again and again, some healthy, others not so much. One of my main ones has been: Why do we still not have a proper early warning system for genetic erosion? You tell me if it’s healthy or not.
I first raised the question in 2009, in a post cheekily titled “Reporting threats to agrobiodiversity: A modest proposal”. I was inspired by ProMED, the disease-outbreak reporting system, and by a participatory mapping tool called pestMapper. Oh, and by Jonathan Swift.
The analogy seemed obvious. If a new pathogen appears somewhere, people can report it, someone can assess the information, and the reports can be aggregated to give us a picture of where the threat is spreading, or indeed where there are multiple threats. So why not do something similar for genetic erosion? What if losing a crop or variety in a particular place triggered the same kind of alarm as the outbreak of a new pathogen?
I even sketched out what a putative…wait, what shall we call it? The Global Agrobiodiversity Surveillance Programme — GASP for short? Yes, let’s go with that. What might GASP look like? Well, for a start: a way for people to report diversity that was disappearing, being replaced or becoming difficult to find; a system capable of dealing, somehow, with the inconvenient fact that the same variety might have several names, and similar issues; and maps and other visuals that could reveal trouble before it became irreversible.
And perhaps, I suggested, we could bundle in something contributors to the system might actually directly benefit from — like a way to get seeds, for example — so that it didn’t become another worthy database that nobody visited.
Worthy indeed. Seventeen years on, nobody has built the thing. Yet.
It has, however, been mildly gratifying, in a slightly irritating told-you-so sort of way, to see the idea keep resurfacing in other people’s work, dressed up in new technology each time.
For example, at one point I got excited about a Slow Food appeal for information on Italian vineyards under threat of destruction. Could crowdsourced alarm-raising like that be the closest thing yet to the system I had been going on about?
I don’t think I blogged about it, but there was also a project in Puglia that used Open Data Kit and Google Fusion Tables to collect information, including GPS readings and photographs, on vegetable crops at risk, then map and share it. Well, that sounds a bit familiar.
But there was kind of a fundamental problem. Before you can warn about genetic erosion, you need to know what genetic erosion looks like. And that’s not always easy.
This is where the notorious “75% of crop diversity has been lost” statistic comes in. I spent a lot of time on the blog — maybe too much time? — taking that claim apart, because we didn’t seem to know what the 75% was 75% of, or how either the starting point or the loss had been measured. We can’t build an early warning system out of made-up numbers. As I put it at the time, we should admit that we don’t know how much crop diversity has been lost overall, and go out and get better numbers. Fifteen years later, we do have some better numbers, indeed we have a review of all the numbers, I’m still “100% sure that 75% is incorrect”. But I still don’t know what headline number for the crop diversity we have lost to give to a journalist.
Yes, genetic erosion is annoyingly slippery. A farmer can stop growing a variety without losing the seed. A variety can survive in one village after disappearing from ten others. Two varieties can acquire the same name. One variety can acquire several names. A new variety can replace an old one without reducing the total number of varieties. The number of varieties can stay constant while their genetic complement and composition changes.
An example of this comes from two studies of sorghum in Ethiopia I blogged about in 2008. One found that farmers had stopped growing some varieties, but that the number of distinct variety names in the area had actually increased. Another found important varieties disappearing or becoming marginalised, while overall phenotypic diversity did not show a decline. The picture was one of “tremendous dynamism”: local losses, but also gains and turnover.
A snapshot tells you what exists. You need a time series to tell you what is changing.
And because farmers’ diversity doesn’t exist in isolation, monitoring those changes would need to connect with the processes that actually make diversity move. In other words, we shouldn’t just monitor the plants. We should monitor the systems that determine which plants get grown.
More recently, the technology for doing that has become rather tantalising. Satellite data on global human modification of ecosystems had me daydreaming yet again about a real-time version focused specifically on farming landscapes — “a perennial favourite here,” as I put it at the time, by which point I wasn’t even pretending to have an original idea anymore.
Then a Brainfood roundup mentioned remote monitoring of drought stress. If satellites can give us early warnings of drought, why shouldn’t we eventually be able to detect environmental and other changes that put crop diversity at risk? At this point, any spatial dataset that smells vaguely of early warning gets roped into the running list.
And it isn’t only satellites. Just a few weeks ago I pointed to FAO’s work on tools for capturing wild foods in dietary surveys: local inventories, market surveys, harvest calendars and identification aids. Why not adapt those methods to crop diversity? If they get widely adopted, you just need to mine the resulting information and aggregate it.
In “Listening for genetic erosion”, I wrote about a longitudinal study in which researchers returned to the same Australian livestock producers and landscapes after about fifteen years, using repeat photographs and interviews to understand what had changed. I was particularly taken by their use of “I-Poems”: first-person statements assembled from interviews to capture how people themselves experienced change. Why not do something similar with crop diversity? And feed the poems into the system.
A variety doesn’t usually go from “important” to “extinct” in a single bound. There is a story in between, and those stories may provide some of our best early warnings.
Put all this together and, after twenty years, I think I have a better idea of what GASP might actually look like. Not one giant database, and not a map with little red flashing lights, but a collection of imperfect sensors: threat reports, repeated field surveys, seed-system information, farmer interviews, spatial data, genebank records, remote sensing, all monitored in real time — presumably by Skynet — helping to identify places where the probability of important diversity being lost is increasing.
We keep half-finding the tool. Someone builds a citizen science app. Someone else maps a global index of something or other. Someone develops a new way of surveying crops from space. Someone puts a clever machine-learning model on top of a mountain of data. Someone creates a fancy dashboard.
And I write a post going: “Ooh. Is this it?”
It never quite is, and I go back to waiting for the next piece of the puzzle.
It’s like Twain said. Making predictions is always difficult, particularly about the future. Spotting genetic erosion is genuinely hard, especially before it happens. But I’m pretty sure we’ll eventually crack it. The technology will get better, the datasets will start talking to each other and someone will finally build something that truly deserves to be called GASP.
And then, of course, we’ll have a new problem.
Because knowing that crop diversity is in danger of disappearing is not the same as doing something about it. An early warning system can tell us that a landrace is becoming rare, that a landscape is changing, or that some other signal deserves attention. It can tell us where to look and perhaps even how urgent the situation is. But then someone has to decide what happens next.
Is the diversity already safely conserved somewhere? Should it be collected? Should farmers be supported to keep growing it? Does the seed system need strengthening? Is there someone who needs to be told about it? Or is this actually a perfectly normal bit of turnover that doesn’t require a conservation response at all?
In other words, once we finally solve the problem of seeing genetic erosion coming, we’ll have to get good at responding to it.
Which is probably the chief lesson of twenty years of discussing this on the blog. The problem keeps moving one step further downstream. First we needed to know what had been lost. Then we needed to know what was in danger of being lost. Now we need to work out how to turn a warning into a solution.
I’m quite looking forward to that problem, though. It seems like a healthier one to have.

https://agro.biodiver.se/2026/10/not-too-early-for-an-early-warning-system-for-pgrfa/

Rounding off the 20th anniversary celebrations I’ve been ...

2026-10-16T02:40:39Z

Rounding off the 20th anniversary celebrations

I’ve been celebrating 20 years of the blog with deep dives into its past, focusing on my favourite recurring themes. I did one post a day for a week, but I could have gone on for a month, I reckon. By way of summary, here are the links:
genebanks in trouble to kick the whole thing off
Pompeii grapevines
cassava
Carolina Gold rice
gap analysis
“lost” Ecuadorian chocolate
apples
early warning system
Let me know in the comments or on social media if you have your own favourite subject you’d like explored in the archives, and I’ll see what I can do. Or you can do it yourself and send me the results and I’ll share them on the blog.
BTW, since we’re reminiscing, this is what Jeremy had to say about the blog on its 15th birthday.

https://agro.biodiver.se/2026/10/rounding-off-the-20th-anniversary-celebrations/